I felt the same disgust when I read that Krugman got the Nobel. I suppose because I have had a residual respect for the idea of a Nobel Prize, built up from hearing about it since childhood. But in recent years it’s become clear that the Scandinavians who award the prizes seem to be using it to a significant extent to make political statements - for example, giving it to Al Gore, for God’s sake, for the global warming scam which I can just about guarantee will be completely off the radar ten years from now, just as the global cooling scare of my teenage years in the 1970s is now forgotten.

I get this real sad feeling when I see my smart, normally sensible friends applauding the various continuously growing intrusions into our freedoms. When my city outlawed smoking in restaurants and bars, my friends applauded because they didn’t smoke. They asked me what I thought, and I said I couldn’t believe that smart people were cheering the fact that another chunk of our freedom was taken away.

And I am furious that this financial situation is being blamed on “unrestrained free markets”. What complete bull. The problem is not the free markets, it is the government guarantees that created the massive moral hazards that then were quite naturally and entirely predictably taken advantage of by people trying to make money, as all people everywhere always do.

I agree about the balkanization. I think that’s where we’re headed. We’re heading for a Latin American kind of nation with all of the corruption that entails. (And part of the problem is the increasingly non-white character of the population. Nations of European people, especially Northern European people, have a much better track record of maintaining a civilization that I’d care to live in than Latin America and the rest of the Third World.)